It is often desirable for entertainment and other venues, such as water parks and ski resorts, to provide means by which customers can securely store their personal belongings while visiting various attractions at the venue or engaging in other activities. Some venues and locker companies provide customers with access to coin operated locker systems, which allow customers to rent compartments by inserting one or more coins into a payment slot adjacent to or on the compartment. While coin operated locker systems provide an ability for customers to secure their belongings, they suffer from numerous disadvantages. For example, such systems, being mechanical in nature, are prone to breakdown. They also require personnel to periodically retrieve large amounts of coins inserted by customers, which can be labor intensive and time consuming.
Other venues and locker companies provide customers with access to electronic locker systems. Such systems typically comprise a bank of compartments and a kiosk that allows a customer to rent and access one or more of the compartments using credit cards, cash or other forms of payment. After completing the rental process, the user secures his/her personal belongings in the rented compartment. To access the compartment, the user enters a personal identification code (e.g., a PIN or password) into the kiosk, which then opens the rented compartment electronically.
While electronic locker systems address many of the problems of coin operated lockers, they still suffer from numerous disadvantages. For example, such systems are prone to user congestion or queuing at the kiosk, as only a single kiosk is provided for rental and access functions. Queuing in such systems is particularly problematic when demand for locker services is higher than normal, for example, at closing time or at the end of specially scheduled events when large groups of customers may wish to access the locker system at the same time. At these peak times, customers may be forced to wait in line to access and/or rent a compartment, thereby causing customer frustration and discontent. Long lines also reduce security, as sensitive information entered by a customer at a kiosk may be visible to other customers waiting in line. Queuing may result even when multiple kiosks are employed, as secondary kiosks are often positioned at significant distances from the storage compartments or at other inconvenient locations throughout a venue. These secondary kiosks are often ignored or utilized less frequently by customers.
To address these concerns, electronic locker systems have been developed with individual access keypads on each compartment. In this manner, a customer may bypass the kiosk and obtain compartment access by entering his/her personal identification code directly into the keypad on the rented compartment. While these systems reduce queuing by allowing multiple customers to access compartments at the same time, they suffer from the disadvantage of requiring specialized hardware and software on each and every compartment door. This added complexity reduces the reliability of the system and increases costs significantly. These systems are also prone to congestion and crowding in instances where multiple customers with rented compartments in close proximity seek to access their respective compartments at the same time. This problem is particularly acute in situations where customers wish to simultaneously access compartments in the same column. These systems also do nothing to reduce rental queuing, as customers must still interface with the kiosk to rent a compartment. This is especially concerning, as rental queuing is expected to worsen in the future, as locker system manufactures adopt Europay-MasterCard-Visa (“EMV”) technology for processing rental payments by credit card. EMV technology, while adding security to credit card transactions, requires significantly more time for processing payments, thereby increasing the time required for customers to interact with kiosks.